SAP and NetBase – new partnership for social insight and analysis

December 13, 2011 by Nic Smith, Sr. Marketing Director, Analytics

SAP and NetBase recently announced a new partnership for social insight and analysis. With this partnership, SAP is hoping to push the NetBase product to far more than the usual suspects in the marketing department. “Sales people can use it to fine-tune pricing strategies and get closer to customers, while consumer product development groups can improve their planning processes. What trends in fashion are going to be relevant next spring? If you’re going to be doing offshore production, you need to know now,” said Byron Banks, SAP.

The SAP® Social Media Analytics application by NetBase is an on-demand, subscription-based solution that your organization can use to gauge net sentiment – the net result of analytics related to any topic mentioned on social media sites. Enter a topic in the application to quickly see a summary of that topic’s net sentiment. The application’s sophisticated, natural-language processing engine also extracts the following insights from postings of social media users:

Likes/dislikes

Behaviors (buy, want, return)

Emotions (love, hate)

Intensity of emotions (like/love)

Learn more by watching this overview video:

Here are few interesting quotes in response to the recent news.

“The real value in social media analytics, of course, comes in using it to understand the business, says Zach Hofer-Shall, an analyst with Forrester Research. SAP’s plans to allow customers to use SAP Social Media Analytics by NetBase, as the application will be called, to leverage unstructured data with the structured data in their enterprise systems could be extremely valuable for its customers.” Zach Hofer-Shall, Forrester

“The new SAP Social Media Analytics service aims to bring more consumer-centric smarts to SAP customers by pairing NetBase semantic search and analytics with SAP’s own business intelligence expertise.” Barb Darrow, GigaOm

“Just as the SuccessFactors deal is meant to help SAP go after Salesforce.com in the cloud, the NetBase partnership will help SAP respond to–and, it hopes, outflank–the Salesforce social enterprise strategy, which was advanced this year through that company’s acquisition of Radian6.” Doug Henschen, InformationWeek